Premier League football may be beyond Plymouth Argyle while James Brent remains in charge at Home Park, he has admitted.

The Pilgrims chief did not rule out the club reaching the summit of English football in the long-term future because of its catchment area, but accepted it was not an ambition he felt he could deliver.

Brent was talking about the future prospects of Home Park if Argyle look to expand the stadium in the future and whether the proposed ice arena would limit growth.

If the plans to refurbish and extend the current Grandstand receive approval from Plymouth City Council on December 14 the current ground capacity will increase to 18,500.

Further down the line the plan is to fill the corners of Home Park and up the capacity further to 20,000 or more depending on proposals around safe standing.

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In 2004/05, Argyle’s first season in the Championship with Paul Sturrock, the average home attendance was 16,419. It remained between 10,000 and 14,000 until relegation to League One.

Therefore, Argyle would almost certainly need to be a Premier League outfit to warrant a stadium capacity beyond 25,000.

If the club did pursue that number, the obvious solution would be adding three lots of seating to the Devonport End, Lyndhurst Stand and Barn Park End, according to Brent.

“Those are the easy bits and that will take you into your mid-20,000s. It will take you to well over twice the size of Bournemouth and Stoke’s operated on a similar size for some time,” he said.

“You follow the dream through and we actually get sustainably in the Premier League, I’m not suggesting we’re going to get there, but ruling it out as a possibility is wrong with the catchment we have.

“It’s not an ambition we think we can deliver for the club, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an ambition that ultimately could come to the club.

Plymouth Argyle's current offices would be replaced by an ice arena under the planning proposals for the area (Image: Penny Cross)

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“If we get sustainably into the Premier League, we get European football, where do you go from there?

“The last place you would actually start is knocking down the current, new Grandstand, which has got the hospitality you really want and you built at significant cost to get there.”

While he is the club’s current owner, Brent understands decisions he makes now will impact the plans of his successors in decades to come.

He believes if the time ever came Argyle needed to go beyond 30,000 or 40,000 in capacity, they would surely be looking at European football and a new home entirely.

“What you do is look at one of the other sides or ultimately, if you wanted to get to a 45,000-seater stadium, then you would start raising the question as to whether you used Home Park as a wonderful training facility for your under-23s and you built something out which was close to the road network,” he said.

“What we need to do is to future-proof to a sensible degree, which we’ve done.

“[If you were] stable, in the Championship, even flirting with the Premier League you wouldn’t want much greater capacity than we currently cater for within the current stadium.

Plymouth Argyle chairman James Brent discusses his plans for Western Gateway with Herald Sport's Beren Cross near the Life Centre in November 2017. (Image: Penny Cross)